My family has farmed the same land near Colchester in Essex since the 1850s at least. I work with my son and we grow traditional British crops – wheat, oilseed rape, pea – as well as more niche, oil-producing crops, such as borage. And then of course there’s the quinoa.

I’m the old one in the family and I like fiddling around with new crops. A professor friend of ours brought some quinoa seed back from Peru in 1985 and we tried growing it.

At the time, we knew about the nutritional benefits of the plant, and thought we were on to something. Quinoa is a subtly beautiful crop – it doesn’t have the coloured flowers of borage or oil-seed rape, but as a young crop it has a multitude of coloured stems and heads, from green and yellow to purplish red. However, the big problem was the bitter-tasting substance – the saponin – on the surface of the seed. This acts as a natural bird repellent while the seed is still on the plant. Once it falls on the ground, the rain washes it and it’s edible. In South America, farmers wash the seeds to remove it and then dry them in the sun. Washing is a difficult process, and, as for the drying, I don’t need to tell you that the British climate isn’t so well suited. Also, there just wasn’t the interest in food that there is now.

Over the last few years, demand for health foods – and for quinoa in particular – has risen hugely. I read that this meant people in South America were being deprived of what is one of their staple foodstuffs, as more and more quinoa is reserved for export. So we set about trying to find a variety that we could grow here that wouldn’t have the bitter flavour of our first crops.

I bought and planted any seed I could get my hands on, and made selections from the plants that grew. Last year, finally, I managed to grow about four-and-a-half tonnes with a lovely flavour. I’m a simple farmer, and not very good at selling things, but almost by coincidence I met the owner of Hodmedod, a company doing all sorts of health foods. It was a wonderful opportunity – the interest from the public was immediate, and we sold out very quickly.

This year we’ve just harvested about 60 tonnes, in part due to the great weather we’ve had, particularly the nice and dry harvest time in early September. It’s still early days, but given that I’ve been growing a new variety of quinoa for so many years I think it’ll keep working out. So we’re hopefully going to meet the tremendous demand for this seed. And I’m particularly happy that this way we are providing an ethical alternative to imports from South America. I don’t claim to be the only producer doing this – there is another quinoa grower in Shropshire. I guess we both had the same idea at the same time. I’m not an approved, registered organic grower but we don’t use any chemicals.

It’s an exciting time – we had a stand at one of the big agricultural shows recently, and we were completely overwhelmed by the interest. I’m at retirement age, but I’m not planning on retiring any time soon! I still love what I do – I just wish I was still 30 …